Disquiet

Yasuo Akai‘s “Short Piece for Guitar” is not particularly short, at nearly five minutes, but the “for guitar” part is worth meditating on. The piece is, in fact, for guitar, which is a clarification necessary for those familiar with Akai’s often technologically enabled work. “Short Piece for Guitar” is also, truly, a “piece”: It’s less a song than it is a piece of musical narrative, working through varied sequences, the momentum always pushing ahead: there’s an opening that pits the slow development of a melody against a rhythmic thrumming, there’s the later emergence of a finger-plucked theme resounding amid attenuated hums, and there’s an extended coda of now familiar material that seems brighter than it had been the first time around. We can hear this as a composition, as a carefully navigated solo exploration halfway between sketch and song, or we can ponder its status as structure-informed improvisation, as something that might have been played on the fly and been lent form only by the fact of its recording and whatever mental processes Akai brought to it during its performance. (Side note: I’d be surprised, and even more impressed, if this did turn out to have been wholly improvised.) But it’s better yet still to hear the guitar piece amid Akai’s other work, like his clockwork explorations of tone and rudimentary drum machine, or his transformations of field recordings, or his “wobbly” sampling of Bach. It’s best to listen to this with the guitar considered as a piece of technology itself, pushed in subtle manners: the resonating strings resembling industrial hums, the layered note patterns bringing to mind multitrack recording. The instrument may be in service of delivering the music to the listener’s ear, but the music is in service of exploring the inherent potential of the device on which it is played. “Short Piece for Guitar”is music expressly for, certifiably from, the guitar. And what could be more technological than that?

Piece originally posted at soundcloud.com/yasuoakai.

The wndfrm track titled “Further” lists itself on soundcloud.com as playing at the intersection of four vaguely defined genres: “dub techno,” “ambient,” “fieldrecording,” and “dubtechno,” in that sequence. Perhaps that is three genres, not four, since the absence of a space is all that distinguishes two of them. The doubling up on these two slight variations on dub techno speaks to the desire for category association that informs much activity on SoundCloud, the hope on a musician’s part that a given individual track will, amid those posted on and listened to on the service’s some 10 millions (yes, 10 million) accounts, find its appropriate audience. As with the fly in the typewriter in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, a simple missing character can threaten to lead to the divergence of two entire realms of listening — or at least be felt to. The emphasis that wndfrm has put on dub techno, the effort to assure that both variations are applied, isn’t just in the track’s favor; it’s in dub techno’s favor. It raises the subgenre’s aspirations. Much dub techno is simply the two things combined: voluminious reverberations amid, or put upon, the somewhat dulled clang of electronic percussion. But “Further” is a welcome melding. The techno, to begin with, is severely muted, the percussion little more than an insistent shuffle and beading background pulses, and thus the dub is less a matter of those beats themselves echoing, and more a generous space in which the minimalism plays out. Arguably, the song “Further” is closer to “dubtechno” than to “dub techno” in that it is a conscientious amalgam.

The embedding feature on SoundCloud isn’t working at the moment, but the track is available for streaming and free download at soundcloud.com/wndfrm. More on wndfrm, aka Tim Westcott of Portland, Oregon, at twitter.com/wndfrm.

The album preview is a staple of commercial music, often coming in the form of collections of snippets of various tracks. In many cases, this is abbreviation in service of tantalization, but in the end it just causes frustration. The snippets are more teases than tastes, and the abruptness of the cuts between them has a stronger sensibility than do any of the assorted individual parts, let alone the collective whole.

But certain musics lend themselves more naturally to brevity. The preview of the album El libro de los árboles mágicos, due out from Tokyo-based label Home Normal label on June 15, is seven short ambient-infused slivers in sequence, each fading into the next. By all appearances, these individual tracks are more drone than song, and thus the segmented view serves to highlight distinctions between them — distinctions that might in fact be less evident when the work is listened to in the more immersive long-form situation of the full release. There is backward masked light noise, and looped bird song, and spectral guitar, and rain heard against what could be a child’s toy piano, and they all combine into a sonic slideshow. The intent of the preview is to forecast what is coming, but the subdued sounds of the music, not to mention the broader concept of an album itself in this day and age, lends the enterprise a lovely tinge of nostalgia. The music is by Federico Durand, and three of the tracks show him in collaboration: track 1 with Chihei Hatakeyama, 3 with Fuqugi, and 4 with Ian Hawgood.

Track, ten minutes in all, originally posted at soundcloud.com/homenormal.

More on Home Normal at homenormal.tumblr.com and twitter.com/homenormal. More on Durand himself at federicodurand.blogspot.com.